The old trees shake out medals at midday
to the ship paused for a meteor's blunting
glimpse in the windy yellow of the water,

partway to inventing another world.
Through the window's tiger slats,
the bakery pumps smoke, years between

her irretrievable shawl, which crimsons
what I see, watching further and further,
until canisters shatter into nitrate stars,

late at night, saluting an unforgiving song.
I tilt down on her iron bed and cluster
haunted basil, the scent rifts morning open

to argon of cobwebs, the dim cargo, the bent
hills, the black gold, her hands, clasped
shut her children, long gone, under the sea.


About this poem
"My grandmother, Aunt May, was a gifted baker, and in the limit of her kitchen, as in the limit of the poverty she lived through, she made bread that was my joy."
-Ishion Hutchinson

About Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of "House of Lords and Commons" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and teaches at Cornell University.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Ishion Hutchinson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate